Smart home, connected home, digital home, intelligent home and digital life are some of the names for value added solutions, products and services that provide users with the ability to use smart devices such as smart phones, smart watches, tablets, smart televisions, computers, etc., to remotely and locally control, manage and get notifications from connected devices such as security systems, lights, heaters, air conditioners, door locks and other appliances.
By using a smart home service, users can remotely change the security system mode of operation, turn connected devices (e.g. lights) on and off, change heater or air conditioner target temperature setting, get appliance excess energy usage notifications as text or email messages, get security system event notifications as text or email messages, set rules so that connected devices would change their state as a result of an event (time, date, other appliance state change), etc.
Typical smart home systems usually include a back end server system. The back end system typically communicates over the internet with a user's remote I/O interface terminal (whether mobile or stationary) and with a dedicated home controller which is the control point in the user's premises. The home controller communicates with the various connected devices, enabling the owner to control and get notifications from these devices. In addition, the home controller or the back end system may include a device scheduler in order to execute device related scheduled commands, set by the owner in advance or otherwise. The system may include smart devices such as laptops, tablets, smart televisions, smart phones, etc., which may be used as an I/O interface to the user.
In this typical architecture, any communication between smart devices and connected devices must pass via the home controller and the back end system. Events from connected devices are forwarded to the user's smart devices via the home controller and the back end system, and control commands sent from the user's smart devices are forwarded by the back end system to the home controller for execution.
The typical smart home solution architecture as described above provides only manual control of the connected-devices. Users can either control the connected-devices by sending an on-demand command or, at most, create a scheduler rule that changes the connected-devices state as a result of certain events such as time, date, another connected-device state change, etc.
Known wireless locators typically use a combination of two wireless technologies such as radio frequency identification (RFID) and Infra-Red, to identify presence of an object in a specific room or area or space of interest. A typical indoors real time location service (RTLS) incorporates deployment of wireless locators that wirelessly communicate with an object within their wireless range for the purpose of positioning the object in a specific room or area. The wireless locators or the object then communicate with an RTLS server platform, acknowledging that the specific object is at the specific location. Due to the nature of RF signals, indoors RTLS wireless locators typically use Infra-Red technology in addition to RF communication to achieve the required level of positioning accuracy.